"I'm not a big fan of the monthly Employment Situation Report. It's a one-week
snapshot of payrolls. It has all kinds of estimates (e.g. small business "birth/death" model)
built into it. Being that seasonal adjusting is an art, not a science, I
am skeptical of the adjusted data. And the revisions are massive.

Conversely, I am a big fan of the state unemployment data on an unadjusted
basis. Folks who have been laid off have an incentive to get in line and
be counted. There are no well-intentioned-but-impossible-to-accomplish assumptions
in the unadjusted data. Those who are in line get counted. Moreover, the
Conference Board puts initial jobless claims in its index of leading economic
indicators whereas nonfarm payrolls are relegated to the index of coincident
indicators."

Here are a couple of charts courtesy of Paul Kasriel.

Initial Claims - 4 Week Average

Continuing Claims - 4 Week Average

I would have to concur with this statement by PK:"The state unemployment data are sending an unambiguous message that the
labor market is losing its forward momentum."

Those trends are far more important that a statement made by some clown at
the labor department trying to explain why they know both how and why the adjusted
numbers are wrong yet they failed to do their job properly adjusting the numbers
in the first place.